Today I had the pleasure of moving a young family's belongings into their just built McMansion in McKinney, Texas. The man of the house asked me if I was religious, so I told him about my recent baptism and chrismation into the Eastern Orthodox Church.
He immediately made sure to let me know, that while he is not personally religious, that he has no problem with people's religions, long as it "makes them happy."
"Does it make you happy?" he asks me.
I paused and then told him, "I would say that ultimately, yes, following this path makes me happy. At the same time, every Christian is called to martyrdom and self-sacrifice, so I wouldn't say the goal is happiness, per se. If I truly followed the path of Christ, I believe my reward would be true happiness. So it's too bad I spend most days distracting myself."
Indeed, I woke up this morning consumed with resentment and anger about having to get up on a Saturday morning to drive an hour in the rain for underpaid work. Poor me. Here is just one tiny example of how I sabotage my true happiness, because the world almost never fits the script I've written for My Happy Life Where Nothing Bad Ever Happens. Too often, I find myself reverting to the ingrained belief that the ultimate goal of life is so called happiness. The result is R.I.D: Restless, Irritable, and Discontented. This cannot be what almighty God wants for my life, but this is exactly what happens when I stubbornly follow my own will.
I recall the first time I attended an Orthodox Church on Pentecost Sunday 2014. The sermon was on this very subject, and how the pursuit of pleasure and "happiness" is literally written into our Constitution, as guaranteed. We rightly hold individual freedom as the highest law of the land. As Orthodox Christians, we agree that God wants nothing more than our freedom to choose either His will, or our own. So the Constitution is Orthodox friendly, in a way!
Alas, the priest added, we Americans tend to place too high a value on personal pleasure and a kind of self-serving happiness. Thus we are guided away from the spiritual fullness found only through obeying Christ. Few, says Jesus, will follow Him through the straight and narrow gate which leads to life, for the cost is self-sacrifice, and therefore, foolishness in the eyes of the world.